Champagne expert Richard Juhlin shares tips on how to enjoy a US$100,000 bottle of bubbly

Richard Juhlin is known as the world’s No 1 Champagne expert and has several accolades under his belt – from Champagne master to celebrated Swedish author.

This season, Juhlin partners with leading German manufacturer of premium home appliances, Gaggenau, to introduce “the art of Champagne” with the brand’s latest Vario cooling 400 series in their range of wine climate cabinets. This coincides with the launch of the Champagne master’s book, Champagne Hiking, featuring “the 100 most magnificent Champagnes for the 100 most magnificent places”.

How would you select a good Champagne?

The best Champagnes are always combined with the best company and the setting and your own mood. If were to say to myself, You can have any Champagne right now, which one would you like to buy? I would have a lot of different answers. Before you [reach] a certain educational level [on Champagne], you shouldn’t drink the best. It can happen that you drink the best and you fall in love with it so much that you want to constantly go back there. This might work. But I think the best way is to start easy and with simple Champagnes, and [then gradually] try more expensive and more special ones. But what the 100 that I picked for the book – out of thousands of Champagnes – all have in common is that they have a certain freshness, and at the same time, depth and intensity, but can still be very different. Some can be very feminine and graceful, beautifully flowery, light and uplifting. Some can be darker, very serious, and [with] more weight.

What Champagnes would you recommend to go with the cuisines available in Hong Kong?

For the first place I have in mind – Tosca [Italian restaurant], at the Ritz-Carlton – I would choose the Krug Grand Cuvee. I could have chosen a Cantonese restaurant, in which case I would have gone for a Bollinger. Because if you [compare] Cantonese cuisine [with] European and Italian, as in the case of Tosca, you go quite heavy on Pinot Noir, you go very often on oak barrels and maturity. Choosing directly [for] Cantonese food, Krug or Bollinger are the two houses I would drink.

What is the most expensive bottle of Champagne you have ever tasted?

I would say that prices of the Champagnes are partly connected to my ratings. I have tasted a lot of the most expensive Champagnes. Many of those I tasted became much more expensive because I rated them highly or they were very rare. [There is] one Champagne out of the 11,000 that I have tasted which I rated 100 points (and 17 to 19 others that I rated 99 points) – it is a very small percentage considering the [size of the] pool – and that one is today priced at US$100,000 per bottle, or something like that. It’s probably the most expensive in the world. It might also have been the third last bottle of the oldest Champagne in the world remaining. It is the Perrier Jouët 1825 – we drank the third last; there are still two more.

How can someone go about learning more about Champagne?